Springsteen European tour sells over 1.6m tickets

The European leg of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s 2023 tour has wrapped up with more than 1.6 million tickets sold.

The 31-date run climaxed last week with a sold-out show at the 70,000-cap Monza Circuit in Italy on 25 July.

The tour visited 14 countries in Europe, including multi-night stands in Barcelona, Dublin, Paris, Amsterdam, Gothenburg, Oslo and Copenhagen, as well as two 65,000-cap headline dates at AEG Presents’ BST Hyde Park series in London.

“Springsteen blew my mind,” AEG’s European festivals CEO Jim King tells IQ. “The first show seemed like an impossible feat to beat, but I think he did it on the second show. It was just one of those great music moments.”

Speaking to IQ last year, Spanish promoter Neo Sala of Doctor Music revealed that demand for the shows helped set a new sales record in the country.

“We went on sale on [8 June] with one Estadi Olímpic, but it sold so fast that in less than an hour we had to add a second show which continued selling equally well,” he told IQ. “By noon… we had sold more than 100,000 tickets which is an absolute record in Spain. No other act in the history of Spanish concerts has sold so many tickets that fast.”

The 2023 Tour, which started in the US in February, now heads back to North America for a further 31 dates

Hundreds of fans were left disappointed after the tickets they bought on secondary platforms for Springsteen’s show in Munich, Germany turned out to be fake. T-Online reports that around 300 fans were caught out by the scam for The Boss’ 69,000-cap Olympic Stadium concert on 23 July. Some people had paid up to €600 for the counterfeit tickets.

According to SZ, similar reports were received in Austria regarding Springsteen’s 18 July show at Vienna’s Ernst Happel Stadium.

Booked by CAA, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s world tour was No.2 in Pollstar‘s mid-year rankings, behind only Taylor Swift, after grossing US$142.6 million (€129m) from 673,277 ticket sales in the first six months of this year. The average ticket price was $211.80.

The 2023 Tour, which started on 1 February at the 21,500-cap Amalie Arena in Tampa, Florida, US, now heads back to North America for a further 31 dates, starting with the first of two nights at Chicago’s Wrigley Field on 9 August. It is set to conclude with a pair of shows at San Francisco’s Chase Center on 10 & 12 December, with multi-night runs also scheduled for Philadelphia, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pittsburgh, Toronto and Los Angeles.

Springsteen’s 2016/17’s The River Tour was the highest grossing worldwide tour of 2016, earning $268.3m over 76 shows.

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